Why the D-Lab at Harvard?

People understand nutrition yet still eat poorly; science has proven the effectiveness of vaccines but many people refuse to use them. The conundrum of people’s activities and beliefs being in conflict with their own well-being has led the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health to create the Harvard Design Laboratory, or the “D-Lab”. 

In the depth and breadth of its schools, Harvard provides an excellent environment for expanding Public Health ability to deal with the complexity of human behavior while advancing design knowledge for well-being. Design methods are applied to address behavioral issues that improve public health.  At the same time, design benefits from public health’s example in the rigor of its theories and evidence-based solutions, in its power in defining public policy, and in the ways it measures the improvement in people’s lives. Harvard benefits by having a new way of connecting its schools to one another through shared work.

Bringing design to public health does not replace current approaches to public health. Rather, it helps solve intractable public health challenges related to people’s behavior.

Why Design Now?

Organizations from many industries are leveraging design to create meaningful solutions even when the available information is ambiguous and fast changing. They adopt design in the pursuit of creating bolder answers in situations where incremental “step changes” are insufficient. Incremental steps to change use conventional processes to gather reliable data, define the problem, research existing offerings and market dynamics, specify a single, right answer, and optimize towards its implementation.  

These steps work well when markets, competition, production processes, delivery channels, and consumers are all roughly stable. But when all of these factors change quickly – as they do today - the standard steps give a false sense of certainty. The field of design provides a more pliant approach that fits the high volatility that characterizes ambitious projects.

The model is composed by seven core frameworks each supported by design methods and secondary frameworks. It can be used to describe the current state of an offering or organization, or to prescribe changes and speculate futures.